Veggie van combats food desert in Easton's West Ward

Lafayette students help pick, deliver vegetables to West Ward residents lacking access to fresh produce.

July 30, 2013|By JD Malone, Of The Morning Call

Two weeks ago at the Easton Summer Nights event at Centennial Park in the West Ward, a silver Ford Ranger pickup stopped at South 12th and Ferry streets. Someone announced that the "veggie van" had arrived, and things got a little crazy.

Dozens of people stormed the pickup and snapped up Swiss chard, zucchini, squash, tomatoes, peppers and onions. More than 350 pounds of free, fresh-picked veggies vanished in less than 20 minutes.

"It was chaotic," Lafayette College sophomore Allie Nagurney said.

"We just got swarmed," said Lynne Holden of the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership.

"We had maybe one zucchini left," Nagurney added.

The veggie van, or pickup truck in this instance, is the latest experiment rising from a collaboration between the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership and Lafayette College's Technology Clinic.

The veggie van volunteers — Nagurney, Holden and several others — pick food at the Easton Urban Farm on the South Side and a college community garden in Forks Township on Monday mornings, bundle it, put it in buckets and containers, then distribute it that night in the West Ward.

The neighborhood was selected for the veggie van because it qualifies as a food desert, lacking a fresh food grocer, and has a more economically depressed population than most of the city's other neighborhoods.

Sophia Feller, the partnership's urban agriculture coordinator, said they knew residents wanted a local option for fresh vegetables, but they had no clue how voracious their appetites would be. Feller said that first night — the van is slated for six Monday night appearances — eclipsed the volunteers' wildest expectations.

"We really worried, like, 'What are we going to do with all of these vegetables?' " Feller said. "And they were gone in 15 to 20 minutes."

The second week, the veggie van parked at 10th and Pine streets and without the crowd for a Summer Nights activity, the harvest, about 250 pounds, lasted a little longer. Maybe 45 minutes.

"All we had left last week were some beets," Holden said.

Esther Guzman, director of the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership, said the veggie van has been a big hit and she hopes it can blossom into something even bigger. She foresees a bigger vehicle, maybe a food service truck, from which someone could sell the urban farm's bounty at steep discounts.

Guzman said many West Ward residents have barriers to acquiring fresh food, such as transportation to stores in Palmer or Forks townships, limited budgets and lack of cooking education.

Nagurney, 19, of Amherst, Mass., tries to provide recipes for some of the less popular greens, like kale and chard, or recipes that combine the available produce — this week she put together a dish marrying tomatoes with fresh basil.

The urban farm, on an 80-foot-by-100-foot plot behind the Easton Area Neighborhood Center, provides much of the veggie van's haul. Feller hopes to expand the plot by 50 percent in coming years, but for now she crams as many crops as is feasible into the tiny field.

Sunflowers peeked over pepper and tomato plants, squash vines clung to the chain link fence, butterfly bushes attracted pollinators and leafy greens choked row after row of tilled dirt. There is even a perennial bed where asparagus plants stretched their spears to the sky.

On Monday, Nagurney sloughed the dirt off hundreds of onions as Holden and Feller bundled and stuffed Russian kale and collard greens into white plastic buckets and Styrofoam tubs. Summer squash filled a tub and a profusion of yellow, orange and red tomatoes collected in another.

Feller discovered the idea for the veggie van at a conference in Milwaukee last year. She said other cities have veggie buses, veggie wagons and veggie vans. Nagurney said the Technology Clinic, a class at Lafayette College, took up the idea and brainstormed about how to make it work. At the end of the summer, the group will put together its research and figure out how it went — but so far the veggie van appears to be a success.

The veggie van distributes fresh-picked vegetables from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. Mondays through Aug. 19 at Pine and 10th streets. Call the West Ward Neighborhood Partnership for more information: 610-515-0891.